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Talk:Weapons/@comment-175.156.156.160-20151129104937/@comment-142.113.229.148-20151129140919
Couple problems here. I'm also going to assume that you meant to say SPAS-12. I'll start with the most practical issue: shotguns are not primary weapons to begin with. Despite what you see in movies, TV shows, and video games, shotguns are a **very** niche combat tool that is very difficult to employ properly and to maximum efficiency, even for trained personnel, We'll look at the small picture first. The SPAS-12 has an overall length of 41 inches, weighs almost 9 pounds, and has an internal magazine that'll carry 8 shells. The weapon's got a cylinder bore, no choke to speak of, which means that it's not going to hold that tight of a pattern. Plus, it's firing 12-gauge munitions, and regardless of how light the load is, a shooter is only going to be able to tolerate carrying and firing so many of those cartridges. They're a very chunky, bulky type of ammunition. With the kind of choke a SPAS-12 has, firing most common types of buckshot, you're going to have a maximum practical, effective range of about 50 meters, and that's pushing it for a human target that you have to hit in the head to put down. Your pattern is going to be anything but predictable and reliable, and if you choose to employ slugs, you're going to be beating the hell out of your shoulder, and it's going to be overkill every time you land a shot, because you don't need to hit someone in the head with a 12-gauge slug to penetrate the skull. As previously stated, the weapon's got an 8-round fixed magazine. You fire 8 times, and you're out, and stuck reloading. Most shooters - even long-time fowling and clay shooters - are not at all proficient in quickly reloading a shotgun, and even less so in a stressful environment. Quickly loading and changing ammunition in a shotgun in a live environment is a **very** difficult skill to pick up, and is extremely time- and practice-intensive to maintain. Most shooters would be doing extremely well to get all 8 rounds loaded back in inside of half a minute. Unfamiliar shooters would be taking a lot longer. That said? It'd ultimately be a waste of time. Because the most utility you can get out of a shotgun isn't knocking people down. It's in busting locks. Let's look at another option. An M4-style AR-15 chambered for 5.56x45mm cartridges. A weapon that is 33 inches long, and that weighs 7.5 pounds fully loaded with a 30-round magazine. The manual of operations is extremely simple and easy to learn, even by people who've never held a weapon before, and loading a fresh magazine can be performed in seconds, again by unskilled handlers. The maximum effective range for the rounds being fired out of this platform is about 500 meters on a point target, with a longer effective range if the shooter's using some kind of optic, and the round that it fires is going to penetrate a skull with no issue. You're already looking at a more compact, easier-to-carry, longer-reaching, easier-to-learn platform that can knock down up to thirty targets in a row, and then be right back to knocking down more seconds later when it's nearly-effortlessly reloaded. Other things to consider are modularity and availability of parts. The SPAS-12 was banned from importation in 1994, and despite that ban being lifted in 2004, no more of these firearms were imported, as the manufacturer stopped producing them several years prior. Due to the era it was originally designed and manufactured in, and due to a stagnancy in weapons design by the manufacturer, the SPAS-12 is also not particularly accepting of accessories such as laser aiming devices, optics, flashlights, and the like; the platform requires special parts and some degree of gunsmithing to mount anything like that, and that's if the compatible parts could be located (doing work on SPAS-12s is a fairly difficult and expensive process these days; they're not incredibly rare, but they're not exactly commonplace weapons with easy-to-source parts, either). An AR-15, on the other hand, is compatible with the parts from just about any other AR-15 chambered for the same cartridge, and many parts are interchangeable even if the platforms don't fire the same kind of ammunition. Most produced these days also have Picatinny rails installed on them when they're manufactured or when they hit final assembly, so installing shooting accessories is little issue. tl;dr: you can do better than any shotgun with just about any rifle, especially when the shotgun in question is a hard-to-find oddity that fell out of consideration for military use because it was too large, heavy, and impractical for what it did